Quote

Freedom is not choosing that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

Iris Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch
Age: 79 †
Born: 1919
Born: July 15
Died: 1999
Died: February 8
Author
Biographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Writer
Dublin city
Jean Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch
Things
Already
Quite
Knowing
Understanding
Freedom
Respecting
Moving
Choosing
Lost
Merely
Make
Move

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
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Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
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One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
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The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
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... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.
Iris Murdoch
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A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
Iris Murdoch
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Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
Iris Murdoch
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Iris Murdoch
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Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
Iris Murdoch
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The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Iris Murdoch
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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch